Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 92:366 (Apr 1935)
Article: Will the Church Pass Through the Tribulation? Part 2
Author: Henry Clarence Thiessen

BSac 92:366 (Apr 35) p. 187

Will the Church Pass Through the Tribulation?
Part 2

Henry Clarence Thiessen

(Continued from the January number)

{Editor’s note: Footnotes in the original printed edition were numbered 17–62, but in this electronic edition are numbered 1–46 respectively.}

III. The Testimony of the Early Fathers

Various answers are given to the above question. Some say that the Church will pass through the first half of the Tribulation; others, that it will pass through all of it; some hold that the spiritually mature will be taken at the Rapture and that the unspiritual believers will remain on earth for this hour of trial; and still others maintain that the whole Church will be caught up to meet the Lord in the air before this period begins. Since there are so many different opinions, how shall we come to a knowledge of the truth?

The answer is simple: By a careful study of all that the Scriptures teach on the subject. “To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning.for them” (Isa 8:20). Neither the Ante-Nicene, the Nicene, the Post-Nicene, nor any other Fathers or writers of the Church, nor any Church Councils or Creeds, have any authority when it comes to the establishing of a Biblical doctrine, valuable as their interpretations of Scripture may be in themselves.

We believe that the Word of God teaches that the whole Church will be caught up when Christ returns before the Tribulation, and shall endeavor to give a reason for the hope that is in us. We cannot take up a detailed examination of the different views enumerated above, but hope to deal with the difficulties and objections that have occasioned them in connection with the positive presentation of the

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teaching of Scripture. But some notice must first be taken of one objection to our position in certain recent writers. Finding it difficult to sustain their contention solely on the basis of Scripture, these authors endeavor to discredit the teaching that the Church will be caught up before that awful period begins by asserting that this is a recent teaching.

Thus Dr. Robert Cameron, one-time editor of Watchword and Truth, claims that “no hint of any approach to such a belief can be found in any Christian literature from Polycarp down, until the strange utterances given out in the Church of Edward Irving...by women speaking in tongues.”1 Cameron’s explanation of the origin of this teaching is briefly as follows: Between 1832–36 some godly and sincere men in Dublin discovered that “all prophecy gat...